Briefly put, at the crisis in the fortune of the new learning in Europe, when the struggle was at its sharpest between ignorance and enlightenment, the vindication of the Talmud became identified with the overthrow of intellectual bigotry. Pfefferkorn wished to burn the Talmud. He was a shady character, and from his first condition as a bad Jew became, in Erasmus’ phrase, a worse Christian (“ex scelerato Judaeo sceleratissimus Christianus”). Pfefferkorn hurled against his former coreligionists the usual missiles of abuse. Why is it that the converted Jew is so often a bitter assailant of Judaism? Some answer that it is because the renegade must prove that he forsook something execrable. Others would have it that intrinsic vileness of character is responsible. But is it not more probable that apostate virulence is due simply to ignorance? And this is the more obnoxious when the animosity takes the form of an attack on literature. “Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in matters of literature, a crime of the first order.” So said Joubert, and the remark can be freely illustrated from the Pfefferkorns. When a real scholar leaves the synagogue, he is rarely among the anti-Semites. Daniel Chwolson and Paul Cassel in their career as Judæo-Christians were champions of the Jewish cause against such very libels as a Pfefferkorn would circulate. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the defence of Judaism was in equally scholarly hands. But it was not on Jews, whether by race or religion, that reliance was then placed. Reuchlin--as all the world knows--saw no reason why the Talmud should be condemned, and he expressed his opinion in clear terms. Reuchlin, be it remembered, was the most learned German of his age. “By a singular combination of taste and talents this remarkable man excelled at once as a humanist and a man of affairs, as a jurist and a mystic, and, above all, as a pioneer among Orientalists, so that it has been said of him, enthusiastically but not unjustly, that he was the ‘first who opened the gates of the East, unsealed the Word of God, and unveiled the sanctuary of Hebrew wisdom.’” (This sentence is quoted from the Introduction to Mr. Francis Griffin Stokes’ admirable Latin and English edition of the _Letters_, to which I cordially commend my readers.) Pfefferkorn rallied to his side the whole force of the Dominican organization. The issue was long uncertain.